If you went to middle school in the late 90’s-early 2000’s, you either had or wanted a Razor scooter. It was a genius invention! A scooter with roller blade wheels! Just be the top-selling student during your schools’ magazine subscription or candy bar sales contest and one could be yours!

So naturally, as with any wildly popular intellectual property, a Razor Scooter video game was commissioned! Yeah! Can’t get a Razor Scooter of your own? Then live vicariously through this game for only one-third of the price (not including price of Playstation system… which combined would have made it way more than an actual Razor, but I digress)!

Our title screen, complete with totally hip and funky abstract art.

Very quickly I realize that this game is nothing more than Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on a scooter. Choose a level, get your list of objectives, complete as many as you can in 2 minutes, bake at 425 degreees, rinse, repeat, let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

More like Tony Hawk’s Pro SCOOTER?! Amirite? Ugh. Sorry.

But surprisingly, the game isn’t completely terrible. I was very surprised how well the controls function and how smooth it feels… kind of like THPS. The graphics are forgivable because pretty much everything looked like ass in this genre and x-treme sports games aren’t notable for their gorgeous graphics anyway.The soundtrack is… okay. The music seemed slightly hard for a game with such a young intended audience, but the lyrics are clean. The characters are pretty hilarious, because they’re all obviously kids, but they sound like adults, especially when you guide one of them off a building and they yell as they fall to their doom. This happens a lot on one level as the play area is spread over several skyscrapers.

Would not be surprised if she had a smoker’s cough.

Verdict: BARGAIN BIN

Yes, I did say the game was surprisingly un-terrible, but it is still a nearly carbon copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Maybe if it did something unique to separate itself from the popular franchise, then I would reconsider. But as it is, for the same price, you could just pick up one of the first two Tony Hawk games and have a similar experience. There’s not much else I can say about it really. For now, Razor Freestyle Scooter will have to remain 2nd prize in the school sales contest.

Completely escaping my mind until logging in just now and seeing the notification, as of May 29th, FiveDollarGamer has been open for blogness for 1 year!

Say whaaaaaaaaaat?!

I may not have posted as much as I wanted to, but I have 54 posts I’m (mostly-ish) proud of. I’ve had some pretty tumultuous times over the past 6-7 months or so that has affected the amount I write. As much as I love writing about my hobby, somethings like a break-up, starting a new relationship, moving (twice), and losing and starting new jobs (I’ve lost count) take precedent over this. Hopefully with things starting to settle down, I can get back into a groove of regular posts… even though I’ve said that several times in the past.

I did want to talk about some of the things going on personally with me over the past 6 months (aka, around the time the post frequency slowed down). I lost a job in February and have been working on and off after that. Seems like my current job will be more stable than the last ones, so hopefully it all plays out. I celebrated my 26th birthday on May 27th. On the same day I turned 26, my dad hit the big 5-0. When I mentioned I was already over halfway to 50, he joked I was catching up to him. Smartass. I met the love of my life a mere week after my last break up in November. She has been an inspiration for me to keep going in life. Along with her and some friends, we started a retro gaming night every Saturday night (also occasionally Friday AND Saturday nights). What was supposed to be a one-off has spawned into a regular occurrence and in the future we hope to start live streaming some of our shenanigans. We have an episode of a podcast recorded, but the ETA on that getting online is unknown at this point.

Stay tuned to fivedollargamer.com and my Facebook and Twitter pages for more articles and hopefully an announcement on when we hope to start streaming!